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The mysterious processor behind China’s first homegrown supercomputer
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jws 16y ago8 core per die MIPS based processor at 1Ghz. Not much else to the article other than a "China doesn't need Intel/AMD theme".
- Retric 16y agoThis seems like a bad idea. Let’s assume it costs a few million to design this chip, well you can already buy a an i7 which has 4 cores runs at 3.06GHz costs about 250$ in bulk. That’s 4,000 CPU’s per million in development costs before they see a single CPU off the line. If they get something 20% better then they are looking at a few hundred thousand chips to break even. PS: They suggest that it’s going to be 30% slower than a 6 core chip which suggests it’s on par with a current generation chip 4core CPU.
- die_sekte 16y agoChina wants to be independent as far as computing goes. That is all.
- Retric 16y agoThere are plenty of reasons to build your own chip's. For example, NSA was doing so, and probably still does. But, it only worth it if your making something dramatically different than an x86 CPU. The problem is keeping up with Intel is a ridiculously expensive proposition. analysis showed Intel's R&D expenditures were $22.1 billion between 2001 and 2005 http://www.emsnow.com/newsarchives/archivedetails.cfm?ID=13632 http://www.emsnow.com/newsarchives/archivedetails.cfm?ID=136... Either staying a few generations behind and building more chips, or buying from the beast seems like the best option. PS: Intel does manufacturing in china (http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/06/intel-china-fab-to-use-65nm-process-produce-notebook-chips.ars http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/06/intel-china-fab...) so they already have access to slightly behind the time manufacturing technology.
- dcx 16y agoHmmm. Could this possibly be something to do with US supercomputer export controls? Don't know much about this but a quick google showed that the US has been tightening controls lately. I wonder what people are using supercomputers for in the military these days anyway - UAV? Crypto? I'm guessing ballistics is pretty well solved. And you hear the occasional story about suits showing up and requesting that labs disable-in-hardware the execution of Shor's algorithm on their quantum-related tech...
- caf 16y agoNuclear weapon R&D. That's how the 5 weapons states acknowledged by the NPT have been able to maintain the unofficial test moratorium - all the supercritical explosions are happening in simulation.
- barkingcat 16y agocost does not matter when it means you can have an independent processor family to control your nuclear missiles.
- gaius 16y agoMIPS processors in general, haven’t been tested in the context of the modern supercomputer O RLY? Someone ought to tell (what's left of) SGI about that.
- kanwisher 16y agoSgi started switching to x86 for their supercomputers quite a while ago
- gaius 16y agoYes that it true, however it is also true that they were making 2048-CPU MIPS IRIX supercomputers before that, so to claim that MIPS is untried in the massively-parallel space is untrue.
- CamperBob 16y agoOf course, that whole 2048-CPU IRIX machine was probably about as fast as a modern high-end video card.
- 1amzave 16y agoTrue, though until semi-recently SiCortex offered MIPS-based HPC/supercomputer systems -- sicortex.com has been offline for a while, but see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SiCortex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SiCortex
- gaius 16y agoMIPS was a bloody good processor, had SGI held their nerve they might be now where Itanic is today... Umm.
- msy 16y agoGiven China's proclivity for stealing tech and previous history of stolen processors I'll believe this is evidence of China's R&D capability when an independent 3rd party tears the chip down.
- iuguy 16y agoThe Loongson family was developed at the Institute of Computing Technology in China. It's based on the MIPS design but the original processors were missing 4 instructions covered by MIPS Technologies patents. ICT now licence the MIPS architectures directly from MIPS Technologies, so there's nothing stolen about it.
- runjake 16y agoI'm not sure if you didn't read the article or are unfamiliar with the MIPS platform, but it is widely licensed and still widely used in certain embedded segments. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIPS_architecture#Licensable_architecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIPS_architecture#Licensable_ar... My first thought upon seeing the headline was "IP theft" too.
- msy 16y agoI'm familiar with MIPS, I'm was referring more to the specific implementation and fabrication technology.
- metageek 16y agoSince when is MIPS mysterious?
- dkersten 16y agoHell, I even know a small bit of 64bit MIPS assembly...
- brettnak 16y agoYeah, I know a bit of MIPS assembly as well. It was my understanding that MIPS was the standard assembly to teach. Though, this is just through the narrow lens of my life. At my school, when you learned assembly, the first one was generally MIPS.
- dkersten 16y agoWe learned x86 first and then MIPS. We went in pretty deep with MIPS though, going so far as running our programs in a simulator which visually showed the states of the different pipeline stages as the instructions were executed. It was a pretty interesting course, actually. At the end, the lecturer gave us a competition where the person who could sort a list of numbers in the fewest cycles won. I implemented quicksort and I think it took something like 10K cycles to sort 100 numbers. I think the median in the class was 20K and the best was 6K. Fun :)
- drallison 16y agoWhy post a link to this nothing article on HN? There is nothing new here except for the misconceptions of the authors.
- frou_dh 16y agoTrivia: rms uses a Loongson powered laptop.
- radicaldreamer 16y agoMIPS processors are a tad bit more exotic than CISC or RISC architecture, but hardly mysterious. Hell, the PS2's main CPU was a MIPS processor and plenty of people have tinkered with it for various things, including a super computer: http://www.geek.com/articles/games/researchers-create-a-playstation-2-based-supercomputer-20030527/ http://www.geek.com/articles/games/researchers-create-a-play...
- curtis 16y agoIt's not mentioned in the article, but Loongson 3 adds instructions specifically to support Intel emulation. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson): Loongson 3 adds over 200 new instructions to speed up x86 instruction execution at a cost of 5% of the total die area. The new instructions help QEMU translate x86 instructions by lowering the overhead of executing x86/CISC-style instructions in the MIPS pipeline. With additional improvements in QEMU from ICT, Loongson-3 achieves an average of 70% the performance of executing native binaries when running x86 binaries from nine benchmarks.